Abstract
Democratic institutions were on the rise in the 1990s but in many instances are under stress currently threatened by populist authoritarianism. The independence of the civil service, of the courts, and of the press is under various levels of threat in many countries including long-established liberal democracies. This article explores the causes and consequences of this threat particularly for the ability of governments to function effectively and lawfully.
This article comes in three parts. The first discusses the rise of populism and potential decline of liberal democracy, the sources of this phenomenon, and its disposition toward autocracy. The second discusses the implications for institutional capability and independence, and particularly the bureaucracy, under populist authoritarian inclining regimes. The third part asks can we distinguish between normal regimes embarked upon serious policy change from its predecessor(s) and abnormal regimes that threaten democratic political norms and undermine liberal democratic practices? Although the populist surge is affecting many countries of both older and newer democratic origins and significant emphasis is placed on this, many of the details are focused on the United States.
The Democratic Surge and the Anti-Democratic Resurgence
The decade of the 1990s might be characterized as a decade of democratic flowering. Societies in Eastern Europe emerged from Soviet-dominated rule to develop competitive if sometimes unruly democracies. In addition, some Latin American systems (Chile, for example) re-established democratic governance after a lengthy period of military authoritarianism; others, such as Mexico, became more politically competitive. In other instances, despite issues of corruption, major Latin American states consolidated democratic rule at least formally. In East Asia, Korea and Taiwan moved from military-influenced governments to civilian ones and to political competition. Similarly, in Turkey, the influence of the military was curbed. Even Russia appeared fitfully to adopt democratic procedures under conditions of significant economic and political chaos although the former republics of the erstwhile Soviet Union fairly quickly and preponderantly devolved into strongman dictatorships.
In the same period, the great expansion of the European project took place at Maastricht setting in motion a significant increase in the relative importance of the transnational union in relation to its member states and, in particular, accentuating the guidance of an European Union (EU) technocracy and the emergence of a mostly common currency. Understandably, the 1990s were a time of relative optimism for democrats as well as for technocrats. The optimism generated some especially extravagant notions of a near utopian sort even if leavened by nostalgia for the makers and challenges of history (Fukuyama, 1989).
Viewed from late in the second decade of the 2000s, however, the aspirations of this earlier time seem now to have been dashed in many places and threatened in others. Several of the eastern and central European countries that spent decades under Soviet domination have backslid substantially. But even western European countries have been threatened with hyper-nationalist movements that have generated modest to significant political support, and as in the recent cases of Italy and Austria, these have acquired a foothold in government. The optimism that surrounded the European project of the 1990s, despite the skepticism of some European populations even then in national referenda (Denmark and France notably rejecting the initial Maastricht terms), has been significantly diminished with the impending exit of one of its largest members if also perhaps its most Euro-skeptical one, Great Britain.
And then there is the American case. Few anticipated the Donald Trump electoral conquest. Equally unanticipated were two other factors: (a) that Trump would be so demonstrably unbound by established policy and by the bureaucracy and even by the more conventional members of his White House staff and (b) that his party largely became an enabling instrument for both him and his impulsive and autocratic behavior. The main reason for why Trump was so unmoored from traditional norms was that Trump the president was the same as Trump the campaigner. Despite a belief among some of the nation’s elite that the campaign version of Trump would ultimately be shaped by the obligations and norms of governance, there was little but faith (and perhaps prayer) to believe that such a transformation would occur. A disruptive and chaotic presidency could hardly be concerned with a past that Trump wished so much to abruptly displace whatever his motivations for doing so. The principal reason for displacing the past was that the base of his party support and many of those it helped put into office was essentially more compatible with Trump’s harsh nationalistic and xenophobic style than the more genteel expressions of what had once been the Republican Party establishment. The rapidity and near totality of the Republican Party’s dependence on Trump, aside from the more refined members of the conservative and party commentariat and a few politicians who chose not to face their party’s new foundations in quest of nomination, has been remarkably swift. The Republican Party is for now the Trump Party, although its evolution to that state has been in process for decades (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, esp. pp. 145-174).
So, how do these developments affect the bureaucracy and institutionalism? The answer depends to some extent on the setting and the accompanying sturdiness or frailty of both institutions and liberal democratic norms.
Two central questions animate this article. The first is why has there been a rise in populist authoritarianism in so many places. The second is what are the implications of this growing tendency for independent institutions and, in this case especially, the bureaucracy which is both a force for preservation and of technical adaptation? Beyond these central questions, we also need to ask what tensions flow from the basic Weberian principles of unity of command and of technical specialization under any system and, therefore, can we distinguish regimes in which such tensions are normal within a constitutional context and those that are abnormal? After all, the interplay between political leadership and bureaucracy is to some extent the case of an irresistible force (leadership) and an immovable object (bureaucracy).
Authoritarianisms, by definition, almost always erode institutionalism and the rule of law. However, much depends on what lies within the experiences of any ruling elite. After all, the Soviet Union, under Nikita Khrushchev, instituted a form of institutionalized rule in the aftermath of Stalin’s reign of terror to diminish the prospect that another personalized tyranny would reoccur. The Chinese leadership under Chairman Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, also sought to deter a single powerful leader from dominating authority by imposing both term and age limits on leaders—that is, until the current leader, President Xi Jinping, manipulated the system to bring in a coalition that would support his aspirations to cling to power. Institutions by themselves may be unable to deter a single powerful leader from usurping authority largely because the institutions themselves may be usurped. Widespread norms among the political elite may deter that prospect (Dahl, 1963; Olsen, 1983), but even these may be insufficient as norms too are subject to change. To put this bluntly, institutions can be manipulated to suit an autocrat’s ambitions more readily than we can typically imagine, and the norms that sustain adherence to “constitutional” behavior may be even weaker than we may want to admit.
So what exactly is populist authoritarianism? A precise definition may elude us not because the key characteristics that produce it vary but because their relative weights may vary in different political contexts. Broadly, there are conditions that may induce populist receptivities and there are the presence of political alternatives that may supply leaders and parties with available choices. The receptivities aspect implies that there is some variability in the potential for mass appeal depending upon threatening or comforting conditions. The supply component implies that receptivities may be relatively fixed in a populace, but changed options for leadership and capture of conventional political parties may be at least equally, if not more, plausible (Sides, Tesler, & Vavreck, 2018).
One effort to summarize a variety of populisms notes two fundamental claims about populism as well as a fivefold global rise in such regimes between 1990 and 2018 (Kyle & Gultchin, 2018). The two claims are that (a) “a country’s ‘true people’ are locked into conflict with outsiders including establishment elites” and (b) “nothing should constrain the will of the true people” (p. 3). In a survey of contemporary “populist” systems, the authors of this report also note the rise of populism in established democracies and the emergence especially of “cultural populism emphasizing religious traditionalism, law and order, sovereignty, and painting migrants as enemies.”
According to Urbinati (2019), populism is undergirded by the idea of an unlimited sovereignty based on the concept of the nation and the people with a strong leader purportedly embodying those concepts and a subset of people fired up by those appeals. It is likely, therefore, that populism collides with constitutionalism even as the trappings of a constitutional system continue to exist.
Populist Authoritarianism
Despite the varieties of populism, a key element in the rise of populist authoritarianism is that such autocracies accede to power through the ballot box but then try to infiltrate and capture governmental and social institutions and alter norms that have been based on fair play (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, pp. 118-203). The surface appearance of democracy continues to exist but the opportunity for others to wield power is lost. As a journalist noted in Hungary under the regime of Viktor Orban, “In elections—deemed free but not fair—by independent observers—Mr. Orban won a two-thirds parliamentary majority that gives him license to change the constitution at will” (Witte, 2019, p. A10, emphasis added). Michael Ignatieff, the president of the Central European University, now relocated to Vienna from Budapest, observed that the Orban regime in Hungary “has the trappings and institutions of a 21st century European democracy, but uses them to exert the same kind of centralized control as the autocracies of the Cold War” (Kingsley, 2018, p. A19).
For similar behavior in the Americas, the Bolivian president, Evo Morales, who was term-limited asked for a referendum to run for a fourth term and lost. He then turned to a Constitutional Tribunal, the judges of which were personally appointed by Morales, who declared the referendum void (Toro, 2019). In the United States, aside from the “rotten boroughs” produced by partisan gerrymandering, it has become the practice of Republicans recently in North Carolina, Michigan, and Wisconsin to effectively void the results of elections that they lost by crippling through statutory law the governing powers of the incoming victors—the powers that the new election losers had forcefully employed when they held the reins of government.
More generally, it should be noted that populist leaders are far more likely to stay in power for a substantially longer time than other democratically elected leaders and far fewer leave office under normal circumstances (electoral defeat). They seek to enhance executive power, eliminate checks and balances, expand their mandate, attack democratic institutions, and engage in the suppression of a free press, civil liberties, and political rights (Mounk & Kyle, 2018; Ortiz-Ortega, 2018).
Pressures for Populist Authoritarianism
Why have we seen the rise of authoritarian appeals of a populist variety, emphasizing xenophobic tendencies, heightened nationalism, and a form of cultural restorationism or reaction? These tendencies are noticeable in democracies that are new and old. In some places, they have taken over governing power, while in others, they are vigorously challenging to do so. There is reason to think that such tendencies were always there but dormant in varying degrees and perhaps moderated at least in behavior by intermediary institutions such as labor unions which in many places have both lost membership and influence. Even where this form of potentially authoritarian political movement has not become ascendant, it has become a factor in the calculations of establishment politicians amid the erosion of the dominance of long-standing political parties. Notably, in the German elections of 2017, the two dominant parties together—the Christian Democratic Union (CDU)/Christian Social Union (CSU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD)—polled at record lows. The strongly anti-immigrant party Alternative for Germany (AfD) became the largest of the opposition parties, albeit with only about 13%, once another grand coalition government was formed. Even with the formation of the current government, the Chancellor, Angela Merkel, was forced to concede significantly to her Interior Minister (Horst Seehofer) and the then CSU party leader’s hard line on immigration. Otherwise, the CSU plausibly would have left the governing coalition creating the most severe political crisis of the Federal Republic’s post-war history.
In the French election of 2017, the traditional right and left never even made it to the runoff election displaced on one hand by a technocrat Emmanuel Macron representing the center and on the other by Marine Le Pen representing a hard right anti-immigrant and anti-European party with strong anti-Semitic overtones as well. The National Front essentially is a neo-fascist political movement despite Le Pen’s efforts to cover her father’s fingerprints. (He was the founder of the party and an overt fascist sympathizer.) So, the good news in France was that Le Pen was trounced by a nearly 2-1 margin in the runoff election. The bad news is that over a third of the French electorate voted for the National Front.
Of course, the form in which this potential threat arises depends upon the nature of the electoral system and the subsequent forms of political representation. A majority vote system (not one produced by contrivance as in the case of the U.S. Electoral College) tends to reduce the propensity for political extremism to achieve a strong toehold. Notably in France, even as the traditional parties were eliminated from reaching the runoff, the non-extremist movement won the day when the choice was forced between two contenders. However, as with his recent predecessors, Macron’s popularity is in a deep downward spiral reflecting the tension between technocratic reform and the populist impulse for immediate gratification.
Two points should be noted. First, as suggested, authoritarian tendencies can emerge from a governing party once it has held the government reins and been popularly received. Such has been the case in Turkey where the movement toward autocratic government followed upon significant popular support for what seemed to be a government that was producing more prosperity, development, and even freedom relative to the military-backed regimes that often preceded it. Second, while populist authoritarian tendencies tend to be on the political right, they also can be generated from the left as in the cases of Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia. Frequently, they represent a crazy quilt of propensities using populist rhetoric largely to consolidate a form of strongman autocracy and, in doing so, engage in a war against other selected powerful institutions that might be in opposition. Notably, the Argentine case of Juan Peron found opposition from both the Roman Catholic episcopate and, ultimately, the military. Populism, by definition, is anti-establishment and anti-institutional.
Causal Influences on the Rise of Populist Authoritarianism
It is rare, perhaps impossible, to locate any single influence that is decisive in the emergence of populist authoritarian regimes, especially when these are the result of electoral outcomes. But many such influences come together that seem now to form a fairly general pattern. All tend to challenge what is perceived to be an unsatisfactory status quo seemingly controlled by “others”—a hauntingly familiar refrain. But several seem to be notable.
Loss of Confidence in Government
One fairly consistent indicator across developed countries has been a loss of confidence in government. Only Germany has managed to get above the 50% mark, and that figure was before the great wave of immigration took place in Germany (Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, 2016). The United States has been fluctuating some but has been hovering closer to roughly 20% in recent times than 40%. In 1964, the figure was about 75% (Pew Research Center, 2016). These figures obviously fluctuate in accordance with economic prospects and a belief that government is acting in the interests of its citizens. The more divided the citizens and the elites are, the more likely that there is political deadlock or, depending upon institutions, zero-sum outcomes that create enormous frustrations among the losers. Either way, discontent is apt to arise, and when it does, the more likely it is that government will be perceived to be ineffectual.
The Immigration Wave
Perhaps the single most common concern that has arisen in affluent countries has been the rise in refugees and others seeking safety and opportunity in wealthy countries. As European societies have been generally more homogeneous than the United States and Canada, the great wave of immigration especially from the Middle East and the African continent has inspired xenophobic responses from segments of the mass public and, thus, opportunities for political exploitation. Of course, immigration is not exactly new in Europe. Long before nation-states came into being different populations settled in areas that created diversity. But, except for the traditional colonial powers of Britain and France, much of this settlement was from poorer parts of the European continent to the east and south and from points of labor surplus to those of labor scarcity. Africa and the Middle East are to Europe what Central America is to the United States in that many people are looking to emigrate from these troubled and often unstable regions to the more affluent societies of the north.
Although migration to low fertility societies is likely to have positive effects for economic growth and ultimately for the financial support of the social insurance state, the visibility of those from poorer areas has raised anxieties about the erosion of a dominant populace (European) and its culture. These anxieties in Europe may have been promoted by the Schengen rules for freedom of travel within the EU, especially in east to west movement. But the EU also allocated proportionate immigration quotas for each country which Hungary explicitly violated during the height of the great surge while other member states continue to disregard the EU rules pertaining to immigration.
The United States was also the recipient of great surges of immigrants from its south especially from Central Americans traveling through Mexico to reach the U.S. border. Although the United States is an immigration country, it has shut off the spigot during times when the fear of being overrun by others was propounded. In 1924, the United States moved to a strict quota of immigrants from countries mirroring its then current population and largely excluding Asians altogether. It was not until the mid 1960s that the quota system was lifted. It has subsequently not been easy to find a path forward to immigration reform as the fears of the modal European descended White population being overrun have sharpened especially among rural and small town and older Whites—a populace that has been the most resistant in Europe as well.
What has been noticeable on both continents is a resurgence of nativism reflecting resentment toward newcomers, especially along the usual cleavages of language, race, and cultural distance. It was perceived that an order defined by cultural norms and familiarity was at risk. 1 Resentment of newcomers is not itself new, especially as in the past the tribes of Europe competed with the latest newcomers from the continent whose language, religion, or region was different from those that already had been established. The politics of resentment (Cramer, 2017) was brewing in both America and Europe even in places that had exhibited great tolerance and empathy toward newcomers such as Sweden, 2 Denmark, and the Netherlands. Although none of the anti-immigration parties has yet become part of a government among these countries, it is clear that they have achieved sufficient levels of political support to potentially become players. And, of course, they have become significant players in countries that have had experiences with dictatorships such as Italy, Austria, and, most recently, Brazil (Lopes & Faiola, 2019).
Globalism
In the aftermath of World War II (WWII), international and transnational institutions were created to bring cooperative relationships to trade, financial systems, and formalized military alliances. The United States was the one power whose homeland was virtually unscathed by the war. As such, the U.S. economy was in a dominant position globally. The United States sought to promote international institutions that it would dominate for decades to come while it also avoided ones that would threaten its own national sovereignty such as accepting the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice. Overall, however, there was largely a recognition among experts that mercantilist policies with high tariff barriers were counterproductive and that international security was best achieved through formalized alliances. In post-war Europe, the origin of today’s EU of 27 countries when Brexit formally takes effect was spawned from agreements for a free trade zone among France, then West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.
For a bit more than a quarter of a century after the end of WWII, the United States dominated the world scene both economically and militarily and, thus, also politically. Economic competition, however, eventually began to threaten highly developed economies as less developed countries created comparative advantages for themselves first in soft manufacturing and then in more basic industries. Over time, the law of comparative advantage, however imperfectly realized in the real world, generated greater prosperity overall. In today’s global economy, manufactured products rarely have a definitive point of origin. In the popular mind, the national origin of a product is associated with either the final point of assembly or the national origin of the manufacturer whose name appears on the product. Even this can be confusing, for example, as one of the “American” automotive producers is actually an Italian company which bought it from a German company. Moreover, both German and Japanese automotive companies assemble some of their product in the United States to take advantage of the large market. In general, the more highly developed the economy, the more comparative advantage plays to intellectual contributions where the sources of innovation are likely to lie and much less to the manual labor engaged in assemblage.
The overall impact of this change is that some industries shifted to less developed countries—textiles, for example. Others, especially in East Asia, created highly competitive industries at higher technical levels, the consequence of developing highly valued human capital, the availability of finance capital through interlocking directorates, earlier mercantilistic policies, and an intense commitment to economic development. As a general matter, this economic shifting in the world helped make poorer countries richer and expanded their middle classes. It also advantaged the well-educated in highly developed societies (the human capital) while simultaneously making more vulnerable the wage-based middle and working classes as industries shifted some of their assembling and heavy industry production to lower wage countries to remain competitive in world markets and, in some cases, to be closer to prime markets. Consequently, Ford Motor Company assembles many of its vehicles in Europe and Latin America because as America’s most international automotive company, it has substantial markets there where it produces vehicles that are not so popular in the United States.
International trade agreements and regional compacts have generally been beneficial in allowing goods and services to be produced and marketed more efficiently. But there is no doubt that this freer flow of economic transactions has had dislocating effects particularly in small towns that often made a single product linked to a manufacturing industry with many production factors cursing through it. In his dystopian inaugural address, Donald Trump referred to these smaller and more isolated communities as though this was the U.S. economic norm which it is very far from being. But there is no doubt that such communities have lesser human and financial capital capabilities than bigger cities that can generate additional sources of investment to alter their economies. Consequently, these economically marginalized communities, which are overwhelmingly White, have become a source of political resentment against the global economy and cosmopolitan elites. They may be as likely to go left as to go right or to go for the strongman who asserts that only he “can fix it” without articulating any details as to how that might be done. Much depends on how the political appeal speaks to anxieties and fears. For the most part, isolationism, nationalism, and scapegoating foreign workers and immigrants are all part of the authoritarian populist package that has achieved a great deal of resonance in the United States and frequently elsewhere as well.
Technological Change
Although “inequitable trade deals” are the politically convenient appeal to the discontents of the less educated working and middle classes whose economic fortunes have taken a turn for the worse, the larger factor in the reduction of the manufacturing labor force is technological innovation through robotics, manufacturing capabilities, and also in logistics. While the proportion of older highly developed economies devoted to steel production, for example, fell sharply throughout the last century from 37% of world production in the United States alone in 1900 to about 6% by 2017 of a dramatically growing rate of world-wide production, the decline in the labor force is much steeper. That decline is manifested in dramatic drops in employment. But employment rates in the steel industry have fallen dramatically in nearly all countries that have invested in building modern steel plants (Wikipedia, 2018). It just takes a lot fewer people to produce steel, for example, or to mine coal—industries whose resuscitation Donald Trump links to his “Make America Great Again” nostalgia. To take advantage of newer technologies, it is often advantageous to create newer plants elsewhere than to invest in existing ones. Moreover, both steel and aluminum production have been made more efficient by recycling materials used in their manufacture as well as by logistical capabilities (Kruzel, 2018).
In essence, the vast changes that are the consequence of technological advance at least for now create jobs of higher value and overall benefit the economies and skilled labor markets of high tech leaders. This is the sunny side of the picture. The dark side is that the availability of well-paid jobs that do not require much preparation has declined significantly. Swings in job growth now mostly feature the surge and decline of low value added and low wage jobs in consumer industries such as restaurants, hotels, and so forth. The fact that the high tech community takes pride in its technological advances as revolutionary makes those displaced by it resentful, nostalgic, and backward-looking—grist for the mill of populist demagoguery. Plausibly, the disproportion of high-end engineers and scientists working in artificial intelligence and other aspects of advanced technology who are of South Asian and East Asian descent may make for a package of racial, xenophobic, and technological resentments among the displaced and the communities most adversely affected by this displacement.
Transnationalism
One aspect of transnationalism has been the growth of complex multilateral trade agreements that are designed to provide more regularity in the rules of the road for trade encompassing multiple actors. Implicitly, such agreements are also designed to knit economies together more seamlessly along with the freer movement of goods and services. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) ratified by the three country members—Canada, the United States, and Mexico—was such an example. Among other benefits, it induced Mexico to open up its economy and encourage foreign investment in it.
In most instances, multilateral trade agreements were meant to facilitate deeper political integration as well. The recent Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, now minus the United States, certainly was intended to facilitate the freer flow of goods and services between the countries of the eastern and western Pacific rims. But it was also intended to be a counter to China’s growing economic and political prowess. The TPP, now minus the United States, has been negotiating with the EU toward a broader trade agreement while Mr. Trump’s bilateral view of the world has been overtaken by multilateral agreements.
The EU stands out as the most ambitious effort to use commerce and trade as a basis for broader transnational governance. How successful that has been, especially with the vast expansion of member states most of which had only limited if any experience with democratic governance, is an open question. However, three things seem to be increasingly clear: (a) the immigration crisis has placed great strains on the notion that acceptance of immigrants should be shared across the EU countries, (b) the growing authoritarianism of several formerly Warsaw Pact countries has been only meekly challenged so far by the EU, and (c) there is a growing resentment across both new and old EU populations, especially older and more small town and rural sectors, against what are perceived as cultural challenges to racially and ethnically homogeneous national identities. To some extent, one might also include a fourth element which is the fear of “new” Europe’s lower wages and lower wage earners competing against “old” Europe’s higher wages and indigenous wage earners.
Grievance and Anti-Institutionalism
Thus, the growth of populist authoritarianism fundamentally, whether in America or in Europe, has fed off of a sense of declining national sovereignty, resentment toward the outsider, and of the demands of racial minorities, women, and other previously discriminated against segments of the population. Resentment is also fueled by a belief that “the authorities” are distant, corrupt, unresponsive, and cosmopolitan—more willing to let others get ahead of “the more deserving.” However limited Donald Trump’s talents for governance may be, his ability to come up with an appealing phrase for what Robert Merton (1957) referred to as the “locals” was unsurpassed. “Make America Great Again” defines the essence of a restorationist movement fueled by a politics of resentment against those who are perceived to have allowed changes to take place that alter the culture, create economic dislocation, give previous “out groups” enhanced privileges to “get in,” and otherwise lessen the role of traditional cultural institutions. Ironically, of course, one of those cultural institutions which has been declining, namely religiosity, is actually being given life support in the United States by immigrants, especially, but hardly exclusively, among those of the Roman Catholic faith.
Ironically, a restorationist movement, desirous of bringing back some past imagined and glorified status quo is anti-institutionalist when it comes to government. Legal and institutional complexities designed to augment the rule of law are given short shrift, to some extent, by mass publics everywhere. That is the populist side of authoritarian politics. The need to follow procedures and the rule of law interferes with decisiveness as well as impulsiveness. So, it is common that authoritarian leaders appeal to the idea that they are tough and strong, bold and unpredictable, and unchained by institutional procedures. It should not be surprising that they are also disproportionately male and have special appeal to older male voters from the periphery.
Enablers
No authoritarian political leader can successfully destroy liberal democratic norms of government without help. Christopher Browning’s (2017) writing in The New York Review of Books contrasts Hitler’s rise and that of Trump’s focuses on dissimilarities as well as some parallels. First, of course, the situation in Germany was much more dire than it was in the United States. Germany between the wars was racked by hyperinflation, depression, national humiliation in the loss of the Great War and the harsh terms imposed upon it, and violence in the streets between the Marxist Left and the far Right. Second, Hitler was able to consolidate power much more rapidly with the support of the conventional, anti-democratic right than so far has been the case in the United States. Furthermore, the National Socialist agenda was clear even if the murderous intent was not fully spelled out. Rapid German rearmament under the Nazi regime and the major public works investment returned full employment to the battered country, thus providing the Nazi dictatorship with a significant base of approval. The late German political scientist, Karl-Dietrich Bracher (1967), noted that the National Socialists were able to utilize the institutions of the weakened Weimar Republic with the active support of the far right to seize power. The “enablers,” according to Bracher, shared the NSDAP’s nationalist aspirations but may not necessarily have opposed the continuation of the Weimar constitution or supported Hitler’s murderous racism. Together, however, and in the face of decisions made by the Communist and Social Democratic left to abdicate their opportunity to check the new regime (believing perhaps that Hitler was bound to be only a momentarily transient figure), the Nazi ascendancy was both swift and largely legal. In other words, the lesson is that the risk to democratic institutions and their subversion in the face of the right social and political conditions can occur anywhere.
Returning to the American political context, Trump is a mercurial leadership figure with a hyper-nationalist and nativist theme that has a significant base of support in virtually all developed democracies of roughly in the vicinity of 20% to 25% and is likely to fluctuate some depending upon the circumstances. But on any given day, and possibly even in any given sentence, Trump is apt to articulate opposite positions or indefinite ones. His interests lie less in ideology or ideas than in feeding his monumentally sized ego, creating his own reality, and finding enemies to disparage in ways that have exceeded by a good margin the bounds of acceptability even for a system in which the rules and norms of political combat are pretty rough and tumble. He is also situated in a political system whose design was intended to frustrate would-be autocrats and in one in which the norms of institutional interaction in a constitutional political system, while corroded in recent times, have been thought to be resistant to autocratic ambition.
But there also are some parallels in Trump’s behavior to successful autocrats. The independence of the judiciary, for example, has frustrated Trump. So too has the so-called mainstream news media (MSM) which Trump has taken to calling “the fake news” and “the enemy of the people.” Unlike past presidents (Nixon most notably) who have gone “rogue” at times, they at least tried to conceal their intent. Trump, of course, has been given significant opportunities to alter the federal judiciary as well as support to reconstruct the bureaucracy in ways that erode its independence. Much of this effort has been done directly by Trump’s agency and departmental heads, especially in Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Interior, Energy, and State. But Trump himself has targeted his own Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the intelligence agencies. Loyalists to Trump himself, not necessarily just his party, are the ticket to jobs in many of the agencies that have become highly politicized (O’Harrow, 2018). Incompetence and inexperience have become rampant. The independence of at least two institutions—the courts and the bureaucracy—is crucial to the rule of law. The independence of the media is especially important to overseeing how the government is functioning. The more opaque the government is, the harder that task becomes. The more indifferent the citizens become, the easier it is for democracies to turn into autocracies. The recent rise of the strongman leader and efforts to consolidate power is essentially built around the takeover of what had been independent institutions but which have become servile to the autocratic leader who often places family members in charge of these key institutions. 3
It is painful to point out that among the key enablers of a potential Trump autocracy—not that I would place odds on that happening but neither would I rule it out—is his own party which has become merely a flag of convenience for his apparent personal ambitions. Despite the courageous and powerful criticisms of Trump’s temperament, his character, his blatant demagoguery, and his fitness for the office he holds among the Republican intellectual elite and commentariat and a handful of elected politicians, the Trump forces are now in command of the Republican Party at both the mass level and the elite level. The party’s hardcore base holds attitudes that are frequently motivated by resentment and grievance. Trump came to the Republican nomination by trouncing his more conventional opposition in Republican primary after primary. The nastiness and demagoguery was on full display during this time and much of the Republican electorate largely ate it up. There appears to be only reaffirmation at this point rather than a fall-off of support among Trump’s Republican base. In fact, it appears that a significant portion of Trump’s support, including from among past Democratic voters, was drawn to the show. A significant proportion of his support seems to have been based on candidate Trump’s unconventionality and feistiness—perhaps a form of circuses without the bread. His hostility to judges who defied him (referring to one as biased because he was of Mexican heritage) and his relentless attacks on the so-called mainstream media calling all but his beloved Fox News “the fake media” and later in Stalinesque tones, “the enemy of the people” were unconcealed in contrast to Nixon’s own contempt. None of this was hidden from plain sight. What Nixon tried to conceal, Trump has boldly advertised.
Both parties, of course, have sought to gain political advantages when they have had the power to do so. Democrats changed the filibuster rules in the Senate for executive appointments and then later for federal district and circuit court judgeships. But they did not do so for Supreme Court nominees even though they had every reason to believe that their presidential nominee would be the next president and in a position to nominate a person for the vacancy that already existed after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February 2016. After the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s refusal to hold hearings on President Obama’s nominee, the Republican majority leader abolished the filibuster rule for the Trump administration’s nominee, Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Scalia seat. Republicans at the state level went to work on efforts to weaken new Democratic governors’ legal authority (North Carolina, Michigan, and Wisconsin), create Voter ID laws to make it more difficult for low-income people to vote (a necessary method to enhance the influence of a party whose main constituency is older White people in small towns or rural areas), and radically gerrymander legislative and congressional districts when Republicans have had the power to do so. A Republican state legislative leader in Pennsylvania in 2012 had the misfortune of stating openly at a party rally that his state’s new voter identification law would enable the Republican presidential nominee to win the state. The nominee failed to do so, however, mainly because the law was found unconstitutional by state courts.
Perhaps, there is little new in this. American politics has traditionally been rambunctiously partisan when one party gets the upper hand. But the hyper-partisanship that has afflicted the process of judicial nominations, of executive nominations, and of disregarding past protocols of behavior appears to be a more recent phenomenon. And although presidents of both parties have found themselves frustrated by the bureaucracy, the Republicans, especially since the Reagan era, have made the bureaucracy into the main villain of our times and have proposed extreme, even if mostly symbolic, efforts to make it increasingly servile to the political leadership when that leadership is also Republican (Kamisar, 2017; Levitz, 2017). This, of course, is a reaction not only to the growth of the regulatory state but also to censoring the expertise of bureaucrats when evidence conflicts with pet policy preferences (Davidson, 2018).
How preferences are aggregated across different political systems also matters for how prevalent certain issues become on a nation’s policy agenda. One study examining anti-immigration attitudes in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States found that about a quarter of each country’s electorate held strongly anti-immigrant attitudes. In the United Kingdom and Australia, most of these voters have drifted toward right wing splinter parties, although the traditional right-center parties have been trying to woo them back and, to some extent, have moved farther right on this issue, one that was at the center of the Brexit referendum. In the United States, however, the parties are the most polarized of the three countries on the immigration issue mainly because of its political duopoly and, therefore, the absence of articulated alternatives (Kefford & Ratcliff, 2018). What this means is that capture of one of these parties by radical nativist forces provides a stronger enabling capability because a mainstream party embodies these nativist, as well as anti-institutionalist, aspirations and is more likely to come to power, which in the United States it has.
Bureaucracy Under Populism
Unity of Command, Technical Specialization, the Files, and Full-Time Professionals
Among Max Weber’s ideal type characteristics of bureaucratic organization, four are especially notable for the current discussion, namely, the idea of organizational hierarchy providing a unity of command, technical specialization which implies deference to authority derived from technical mastery, organizational and procedural memory, and professional capability. Technical specialization naturally may lead to silos creating the necessity of coordination. Morton Halperin (1974) noted how in foreign policy, every bureaucracy defines a problem from the standpoint of its own concerns, which are built from the problem sets with which it is tasked. Specialized knowledge in a reality-based government, however, is necessary for what S. E. Finer (1980) referred to as “the futurity principle.” Without knowledge, government, or for that matter any organization, is likely to flail and ultimately fail. Frequently, ideological presuppositions get in the way. Large visions unsupported by facts are a common source of failure. Authorities in power want the machinery to be compliant with their wishes and needs. Or, as Terry Moe (1985) put it, the authorities want “responsive competence” as a priority over “neutral competence.” The result when this demand becomes the main, even perhaps exclusive, priority is abundant incompetence. A recent study of these politicizing trends toward the civil service in Poland concludes that “The link between the scope of formal politicization of the civil service . . . seems to be evident and negative” (Mazur, Możdżeń, & Oramus, 2018, p. 84).
Autocracies as well as democracies differ in the leeway they are willing to grant the bureaucracy. A few are organized around the idea of a mandarinate to keep things humming at a high level of proficiency or at least to impose unpopular policies. Singapore is currently a good example of an autocratic but highly proficient system of governance. Other Asian “tigers” similarly were founded on the idea of technical proficiency before achieving democracy which, in turn, was motivated by a popular response against “bureaucratic authoritarianism.” In most instances, bureaucracy preceded democracy. Authority was driven from above, not below. The tension between bureaucratic authority and competence (or incompetence) and the democratic impulse is omnipresent. As elected politicians are deemed to be the agents of a sovereign popular authority, their will in popular authority represents the sovereign will. That, of course, is an extreme rendering of this particular tension and it is hemmed in by traditions of deference to expertise, to lawful procedures, and to semi-independence of the judiciary and the civil service. Much of the time, politicians complain about, while frequently deferring to, the bureaucracy. The extent of this deference, however, is dependent to some considerable degree on the ideological or interest consonance between politicians’ policy preferences and the policies being carried out by any given agency. EPA and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are both bureaucratic agencies tasked with very different objectives. It is highly likely that environmentalists would like to see a fairly unconstrained EPA with a high level of professional and civil service autonomy. It is equally likely that people who take a literalist view of law and order (perhaps those secretly rooting for Inspector Javert) would prefer to see a fairly unconstrained version of ICE.
Professionalism and organizational experience lead to procedural regularity. The relevance of past experience and the importance of precedent can be considered to be barriers to the exercise of popular will—or, more evidently, the will and interests expressed by elected politicians. Regulatory policy and taxes constrain some to empower others. That makes for political controversy because all policies are, at least in the short run, ultimately redistributive. Regulations are especially intrusive. And they can be a great source of political discontent. A lot depends on whether one sees the situation from the perspective of the fox (the predator) or the chicken (the victim), or, in some cases, present convenience or future benefit. Majone (1997) notes, for example, that governance trends have become more focused on regulation than on broad-scale direction. But, ironically, regulation may often be perceived as heavy-handed, distant from the actual costs and benefits of the regulations themselves (whether they are counterproductive), and a possible deadweight on economic growth. To be sure, everyone likes not only to regulate someone else but also to avoid being regulated themselves.
To some considerable degree, the populist undercurrent is fed by the perception of regulatory overkill where local or even individual discretion and regulatory control come into conflict—a problem that not only emerges within national entities but especially in transnational ones, such as the EU (Berendt, 2017). But regulation is often the surface layer of deeper resentments about change, diversity, and perceived relative deprivation.
As the enforcement of rights as well as the protection of common goods requires some measure of regulation, bureaucracy becomes a symbol of an undesirable status quo being foisted against a largely undefined popular will. “Shaking things up” to no certain outcome is a central part of the ill-defined populist idea of change. The change is largely restorationist—a gimmick picked up by Donald Trump (and others elsewhere). A good bit of Trump’s base of support had to do with his style of bringing chaos and disruption and his mocking of “enemies.” In the annals of autocratic movements, scapegoating and creating enemies are tactics that often work well to arouse support against the pillars of the existing order. Disruption of the status quo is perceived as necessary to return to a more desirable status quo ante. Essential to this modus operandi is the elimination of independent or potentially competing sources of authority and the delegitimization of vulnerable institutions such as the independent media.
So far, Trump has sought to unmoor government from its past and from expertise as well as from competing institutions. He has rejected and may not even pay attention to intelligence estimates that come to him. As he often suggests, he is the decider and his decisions are wired more to his gut than any studied assessment of information. He has attacked the venerable FBI and waged a one-sided war with a prim special counsel. He has skewered his own cabinet members and other officials of his administration. He has left agreements such as the Paris Climate accords and the Iran Nuclear Agreement, NAFTA, and the TPP and, therefore, left evidence that the word of an American negotiator is not credible and that an agreement reached with an American government at one point in time is revocable when it is politically inconvenient. He has entered into summit meetings with little preparation and without a staff presence and therefore without a record. Early in his administration, an immigration ban from selected Muslim countries was introduced essentially in secret and without any internal vetting from Justice Department or State Department lawyers. It was suddenly implemented and turned back in the courts. Not long after, a more nuanced version of the ban obviously now with some bureaucratic vetting was introduced, but it too was found legally wanting. Trump concluded from this that he was right the first time. More recently, Trump pulled back a nominee for Director of ICE, Ronald Vitiello, and fired his Homeland Security Department Secretary, Kirjsten Nielson, for being too soft on Trump’s desired immigration policies. In all likelihood, what Trump perceived as softness was an effort to frame his desired immigration controls within the context of legal and budgetary constraints. Above all, he has stretched presidential authority well beyond existing unilateralist norms even of those that were advanced by his immediate predecessor whose legacy he has tried to erase altogether. These ambitions have been largely aided and abetted by the Republican Party in Congress while frequently scorned by conservative intellectuals.
Obviously, disorder and chaos are the consequences. The past is likely to be overridden by personalized demonstrations of authority and photo ops. And the future is likely to be mortgaged by commitments that have no record or paper trail. The governing playbook is ad hoc which means that the pages in it are sparsely written. But the overall strategy—if that is the correct name for it—is clear: unmoor government from the past and seek to have its future detached from expertise. The show, after all, is the big thing for populist autocrats.
The Show and the Actual Policies—The Case of Donald Trump
From a stylistic standpoint, both the candidacy and the presidency of Donald Trump is a show—something equivalent to Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment. There are the rallies for the faithful which are largely a form of entertainment for the seriously disgruntled. There are the tweets that are themselves often deranged. There are the charges defaming the media as “fake” and the “enemy of the people”—a charge previously used by the Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin. There is the claim that “elections [that he might lose] are ‘rigged’” along with the investigation into the Russian intervention in the election that brought him to the presidency. The tweets insult assorted Trump critics, personally and institutionally, and offer praise for assorted lackeys. It is a kind of theater of the absurd. There are of course harsh criticisms toward our country’s traditional friends and considerable sympathy toward America’s traditional adversaries. And there is a kinship with the sorts of autocrats that Trump himself apparently would like to become. The “show” apparently appeals to some crude populist instinct in which Trump acts as vulgarian-in-chief crudely contemptuous of procedure, legality, and institutions as well as norms of civility. Several cabinet officials and White House senior staff personnel have all tried to rein in Trump’s penchant for sowing chaos and disruption. None appear to have succeeded. The consequences are policy without review, seat-of-the-pants decision making without reference to precedents or legal authority or the interests of others in a long play game, and hence a lack of credible commitment. Ultimately, the only people willing to serve such a leader are self-interested lackeys.
And then there are Trump’s policies. Trump has not been able to get a lot of legislation, aside from the tax bill, out of Congress, a body that has become notoriously inept at its supposed principal function, but he has managed to get the Senate to confirm many judicial appointments stopping only at those whose incompetence for the task surpassed the Maxwell Gluck test. 4 The judicial appointments, in line with those of most presidents since the era of sharpened partisan cleavages and big money PACs (political action committees) and partisan “Public Interest” groups came into play, have been very straightforwardly pleasing to partisans. (I assume, based on recent past experience, that a Democrat’s nominees would be equally pleasing to Democratic partisans with the possible exception of Judge Merrick Garland’s stalled nomination to the Supreme Court.)
Trump’s nominations to his cabinet have largely come from the far right reaches of his increasingly far right party. His tax bill (actually Congress’s) was a gift to the wealthiest segment of the public and to corporations while adding about 1.6 trillion dollars to the debt. His multitude of executive actions have been designed to sabotage the Affordable Care Act (ACA) by altering the risk pool and eliminating the subsidies to insurance companies that may face unanticipated financial risks to stay in the ACA’s insurance markets. Protections for the environment and to ward off accelerating climate change have been radically weakened by executive order. Protections against predatory behavior business and lending practices have been sharply eroded through executive fiat (as they were to some degree produced by the preceding administration). For all practical purposes, the populism, except for the show, is hollow. The reality, with some exceptions mainly in foreign and trade policy, is a form of Reaganism on steroids, but without Mr. Reagan’s charm.
Whether this is all by intent and part of a calculated political strategy or merely the consequence of making untenable promises off the cuff by an uninformed and inexperienced candidate and president is impossible to say. What is possible to say, however, is that the institutions of our government are largely in a state of confusion in many cases about what their position is as are other governments about ours. Is it what the president says impulsively or what the institutions have been committed to by past commitments and practices? There is, in other words, a credible commitment problem of what the government’s actual policies are. Who speaks for it authoritatively? This issue is reflected in the remarkable instability of high- and even medium-level political appointees in the departments and in the Executive Office of the President (EOP). A Brookings Institution study (Tenpas, Kamarck, & Zeppos, 2017) has shown the remarkably large turnover in appointed positions in the Trump administration. And, notably, those designated as geniuses when they were appointed become “dumb as a rock” after they were fired or resigned in protest. The result naturally is chaos leading to a government unhinged and incapable. 5
As is often the case of political leaders with autocratic ambitions, the populist show is the come-on. What follows if the leader attains power is to find segments of the elite who will help the leader to retain power. In this regard, Trump has followed a script that hardens the base that he already has without expanding it. The nativist and plutocratic segments of the Republican Party have been attracted to Trump—the former because of his obvious appeal to them, and the latter because he enables their policy preferences of a low tax, low regulation state, and limited safety net.
Trump lives in the present as do many aspiring autocrats. Ironically, both the past and the future are discounted. Effectively, bureaucracy is both the past and the future. It has institutionalized the past by the accumulation of programs and laws. And it focuses on the future through technical expertise. 6 What is sustainable financially, ecologically, technically, and socially? To be sure, these are not always consistent with one another. However, Trump, as well as other populist autocrats, turn to whipping up their support base rather than generating strategies for governing.
Normal and Abnormal Regimes
As earlier noted, all leaders want the governmental apparatus to be responsive to them, and all complain when it is not. How do we then distinguish between administrations with large scale policy departures from the recent past from those that may have ambitions for power beyond that? Are there inflection points? If so, can we recognize those in real time? Perhaps one might distinguish between a Reagan whose attraction for his supporters were his beliefs and a clear cut agenda that early on in his administration provided a wave of people faithfully committed to a small, low tax, and low regulation government. To achieve this, Reagan needed administrative responsiveness to shed governmental intervention and regulation. Reagan, the person, however, was relatively unassuming and even low key. He knew what he was and also knew what he did not know. But he did know what he wanted to achieve. Trimming certain agencies and bolstering others was part of the plan (Maranto, 1993).
Bringing senior civil servants with more favorable attitudes toward the administration’s policies as it affected their agencies into positions more likely to interact with political appointees was another (Aberbach & Rockman, 1995). From the time of the previous Republican administration (Nixon/Ford) to the time more than midway through the 8 years of the Reagan administration, there was clearly a major shift in the political leanings of the senior civil service.
At the outset of the Reagan Presidency, there was a great distance between its goals and the likely predispositions of many senior career officials who were Democrats or even Independents. Political motivation might have been reasons for departure among civil servants but we do not know precisely. Many of the agencies disfavored by the Reagan administration suffered Reductions in Force (RIFs), but mostly it appears that there was reshuffling of personnel from positions closer to or more distant from where the political interface occurred. In any case, in the agencies the Reagan administration most cared about changing to accord with its policy directions, the people most proximate to the political interface roles had also become more compatible with the administration’s aims.
By contrast, when the Nixon administration came to office, it was relatively slow to make its political appointments at non-prime levels. Part of this was because Nixon was somewhat paranoid about appointees becoming more loyal to their departments than to the White House. Nixon preferred to run as much as could be done through the White House and so set up an enlarged White House staff to oversee virtually parallel departments (Nathan, 1983). When this did not succeed to the extent that Nixon wished, the second Nixon administration utilized another tactic which was to place a trusted emissary from the White House into key second-level positions within the departments—essentially its agent inside. Ultimately, this too failed mainly because Nixon’s abuses of executive power in regard to the Watergate episode came to public attention through televised hearings, the firing of the special counsel, Archibald Cox in what became known as “the Saturday Night Massacre,” and Nixon’s ignominious departure from office. Unlike Reagan, Nixon’s interest in bureaucratic responsiveness was less a matter of ideological principles than it was of personal loyalty and political fealty to the principal. These are characteristic hallmarks of “strongman autocracy” (Fisher, 2018). The system did work as has been proclaimed but it did so largely because the opposing party had majority control in both chambers of Congress and spearheaded hearings and the consideration of articles of impeachment. In that era, enough Republicans (even though a minority) joined in to ensure that Nixon would resign.
To be sure, Nixon’s agenda was complex, and some Republicans thought his initiatives to be too liberal. There is much truth in that certainly in the early going when Daniel Patrick Moynihan was Nixon’s chief domestic policy adviser. 7 But Nixon also sought to appeal to what he referred to as “the silent majority” of less educated White males often in craft labor unions and the construction trades as well as law enforcement and fire fighters. As with Trump, Nixon had his preferred targets—mainly African Americans radicalized over racial oppression and college students, often their professors, and assorted “hippies” (an overlapping group to be sure!) who engaged in demonstrations and more against the administration’s continuance of the war in Vietnam. He knew that it was not difficult to rile up opposition to these groups and, hence, support his war and law and order policies. In addition, while the Nixon administration policies pursued greater racial equality, it largely did so in institutions that mainly were pillars of support for Democrats—labor unions and universities. When it came to racial desegregation in southern school districts, however, the Nixon “Southern Strategy” was at stake and enforcement was slow walked leading to conflicts with both the bureaucracy, including its own early appointees, and the judiciary.
Eventually, Nixon’s “administrative presidency” was perhaps the first truly concerted effort in modern times to bring the bureaucracy to heel, initially by ignoring it and then later by obtrusively overseeing and directing it. We know now, only because of the Watergate scandal and the taped recordings of the cover-up efforts, the extent to which Nixon sought to bring some of the agencies of government into complicity, especially the FBI. Was this a normal or an abnormal regime? Looking back upon it, had the scandal not been broken it is likely that critical agencies of government would have fallen under Nixon’s effort to continue a successful cover-up and abuse of power. The ambition to control, to delegitimize opposition, and to conceal that led to his downfall which was less a triumph of political institutions or norms than the viability of a free and well-resourced press (which is a lot less well-resourced these days), the dominance of the opposition party in Congress, and the back door opening to a high-level career official in the FBI who became known as “Deep Throat.”
So, now we come to Donald Trump. If Reagan came into the presidency to “get government off our backs,” Trump was voted in for many reasons—a not very popular opponent, a reaction to cultural and demographic changes, a style that was “authentic” to those whose sense of authenticity may have derived from watching “professional” wrestling matches, a desire to “shake up things” and to “clear the swamp” of unknown (presumably bureaucratic) creatures of “the deep state,” to “restore” America and bring back yesterday’s jobs, and, finally, to rid business and the public of “bothersome” regulations. Perhaps more than other recent presidents, Trump committed himself to more than “pie in the sky” promises. He basically had a whole bakery of promises (or half-baked ones) that could not plausibly be kept. Just to sample a few, there was the wall on the southern border that Mexico was going to pay for; there was the health care plan that was going to replace Obamacare and deliver “great health care” for everyone; there were the “terrible trade deals” that Trump was going to get rid of and replace with ones that would make the American people “tired of winning”; and there was, among other things, the banning of Muslims from entering the country “until we can figure out what the hell is going on.” The list goes on. Every demagogue makes promises that cannot plausibly be kept. Nixon presumably had “a secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam with honor. It remained a secret as the plan looked pretty much like the one that preceded it. Even more normal politicians make promises that are inherently doomed. Reagan promised a massive increase in the defense budget, sharp cuts in income tax rates, and a balanced budget. Obama promised people that they could keep their health care insurance plan if they liked it even with the passage of his own health care proposal. That was never in the cards as all insurance plans were required under the law to meet certain minimum standards.
It is true that lying is an occupational hazard of competing for political office and of having achieved it. By all accounts, however, Trump has achieved new, perhaps unbreakable records for confabulating in office. From the get-go, Trump found—as all would-be authoritarians do—scapegoats—The mainstream media, the FBI, the Mueller investigative team, the intelligence community, performing artists, Black athletes, immigrants from non-European locales, our allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and our friendly commercial partners. Trump continues to employ defamatory adjectives to describe his political adversaries and independent institutions. “Crooked” Hillary did not disappear from his campaign antics nor had “Crazy” Bernie. Judges who ruled against Trump’s actions (the travel ban, for example) became “so-called” judges. There is the “overrated” Meryl Streep, “lying” James Comey, the “failing” New York Times, and, of course, the media as “fake” and “the enemy of the people.”
Fundamentally, the Trump Presidency has been an attack on the institutions of government and those of a free society. That also includes the bureaucracy, including in many instances his own appointees, who are tasked with trying to provide a legally justifiable basis to tame and implement his impulsive actions. The pattern that Trump displays appears to be quite consistent with those of other popularly elected autocrats, such as Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Victor Orban in Hungary, Jaroslaw Kacynzski in Poland, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. They are all engaged in eliminating independent institutions and catering to a retrograde form of nationalism. They are, strictly speaking, not conservative but rather populist authoritarians. As such, they have made huge and risky bets for the future by exercising their credit cards to (or perhaps beyond) the fullest. So too has Trump whose two major legislative accomplishments have been a big increase in defense expenditures and a huge debt increasing tax cut during a boom period.
Perhaps all governments are susceptible to discounting the future. After all, Greece was largely a democratic, if corrupt, state while it piled up mountains of debt that later resulted in catastrophic economic crisis from which it has not fully recovered and whose population is significantly poorer. Italy’s new populist leadership is moving along a similar path while also following a strongly anti-immigrant program. The natural political impulse is to do what is popular in the present and kick the costs down the road.
Any bureaucracy likely can be tamed to meet the demands of a government, especially an authoritarian one, if its own independence and that of other institutions are profoundly weakened or even destroyed. That is ultimately the aim of all forms of authoritarianism. When independent and competent, the bureaucracy grounds policy in realism legally, politically, and evaluatively; provides and encourages expertise about options and implications for the future; and grants some measure of deference to technocratic choices. But this also seems to be among the conditions that have helped facilitate the rise of populist authoritarianism—a fear that others are making decisions that adversely impact one’s life and livelihood.
The distinction between “responsive competence” to political leadership and the eventual, if not inevitable, erosion of “neutral competence” is hard to pinpoint definitively. One way of hastening that transition, however, is facilitated by continuing attacks on the bureaucracy and civil servants and other independent institutions in and outside of government. Conspiratorial notions like the “deep state” (whatever that may actually mean) are designed to delegitimize the government and to facilitate an authoritarian conquest of it. It is not likely that one person alone can achieve that conquest. But a continuous assault on government and the bureaucracy, the judiciary, and the media can. To be blunt, in the United States, this has become for several decades now a strategy of the Republican Party, though by no means one accepted by all Republicans. What do we have to lose? The answer comes twofold: (a) the brains and experience with which to govern and (b) quite possibly the rule of law itself. We may continue to have elections and a form of populist democracy but no longer constitutionalism or liberal democracy. When will we know it? Likely as analysts of democratic failure suggest, only when it is too late (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018; Mounk, 2018).
Footnotes
Authors’ Note
This is a revised paper originally prepared for presentation at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston, MA.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.